MAX PAYNE - NOIR UNDERCITY
Chapter 1: The Darkness Inside

I strongly recommend to download the movie because it contains comic strips with textboxes which were hard to read on small streaming windows.

Blackhand Pictures Blog: http://blackhandpictures.blogspot.com

This is the first part of my Max Payne series.

The idea behind this project was, to take the background and storyline of Remedy's Ego-Shooter "Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne" and transfer it to World of Warcraft.
This is the result.
Due to the huge storyline behind Max Payne 2 I decided to devide it into several parts and make a series of the main plot. Another reason for that descision was to create compact parts of 20-30 minutes unless many people won't spent more of their time to watch a machinima.

Don't miss to watch the Prologue I've released in October 2008 if you were not familiar with Max Payne. It contains a summary of the storyline from Max Payne 1 that leads into the plot I used on this movie.

Max Payne - Noir Undercity Prologue

Notifications on editing and style:

From editing point of view this movie is something special and new for me. I started working on this project in summer of 2008 and wanted to experiment with new techniques. One of the goals was to use 3D editing software and custom animations, especially for the use of guns like Desert Eagle or Ingram.

Finally about 80 % of the movie was done using 3D software and ModelViewer/After Effects. It was a hard piece of work, especially to figure out how to get meshes, textures and bones into 3D software. Most of the animations I used were not made by me (animation is a hard business and I think I'm not good enough yet to produce them for myself). So I used a mix of free motions captures, original Max Payne game animations and a few animations made by myself. Nevertheless it was a time-consuming task to rigg all the models to the animated bones and stage them.

At least you'll see a merge of different machinimating techniques, started with ingame-recordings, over green-screenig to complete 3D editing an animation. One short critic for myself. It's not as easy as thought to merge the differnt qualities of footage to a smooth looking complete work. I think to improve that is a personal task for future projects.

Finally I wanted to create a dark looking movie in the "Film-Noir-Style". I think this is a goal I've reached and from that point of view I'm very satisfied with my work.

Notifications on storyline:

If you've played MP 2: do not expect something new on the plot. I've tried to stay close to the original storyline. The goal of this movie was not to invent a new Max Payne story but merging MP and WoW together to something new.
As you're used to in Max Payne the movie elements were linked by comic strip cut scenes, the so called Graphic Novel. Don't worry about that it's a basic storytelling element of Max Payne and it was a lot of fun to create them.

Music:

I've mainly used the original Max Payne game score. Especially on the action scenes you'll find some harder music like The Prodigy, Deftones and Machinehead. You can read a full track list at the end credits.
As a kind of a little bonus I also use a track I wrote and mixed by myself which is based on the Enemy No 1 movie main theme.

Last words:

I hope you enjoy watching Max Payne Chapter 1 as much as I enjoyed making it.
I'd like to thank Tehsaron of my filmcrew for support with 3D modelling and rigging. Watch the WoW-style TV-screen at the end of the movie. It's his work.

//Regards

Varath - Blackhand Pictures Machinima